


Alongside (the Don't Care if I Never Get Back Remix)

by 2ndA



Category: Sports Night
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 19:54:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1562096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2ndA/pseuds/2ndA
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"A trip like this gives you the opportunity to fall in love over and over again: the beauty of an open road, the crack-crack-crack of batting practice, the sheer bliss that is a game-day hot dog..."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alongside (the Don't Care if I Never Get Back Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [celli](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celli/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Prologue (Thirty-Eight Maps)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/185574) by [celli](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celli/pseuds/celli). 



_JEREMY: " **If people just want to hear the score, they can listen to the radio. We have an opportunity to affect their appreciation of baseball."** _

 

**MAP 1:**

Dan picks up _The New York Times_ , _The Washington Post_ , a half-dozen bagels, and, on a whim, _Sport Illustrated_ and the latest _New Yorker_. Desperate times, desperate measures.

Casey opens the door when he hears Dan fumbling with the keys. That’s a good sign. There had been mornings when Casey had still been asleep when Dan returned from the weekend deli run, when he’d still been asleep at noon.

“I thought you liked having Casey in bed,” Dana had teased when Dan had mentioned it. (“No, now’s a great time to talk; it’s good to hear from you. How’s the new show? Good. Oh, here? Things are great. Really great. It’s just—Casey sleeps. A lot.”).

“I do,” Dan had replied. (He does. He really, _really_ does). But having Casey sleep past ten was alarming when you’d known him as an irritatingly chipper morning person who, even after a 2 AM broadcast, was still up by 8:30 and full of Midwestern industriousness. “Daylight’s burning,” he used to say when he called Dan after a late-night taping, “Up and at ‘em. Time to be up and doing. Early to bed and early to rise…” But that had been when he still had something to get up for: a script to write, highlights to edit, more opportunities to drive Dana crazy.

Could be worse, though: this morning, Casey is standing in Dan’s entryway with a mug of coffee, wearing pajama pants and a t-shirt advertising a charity 5k. Dan thinks it might be one of his.

“D’you want coffee? Still hot.”

“That’d be good.” There’s nothing awkward about this: running errands and coming home to find Casey making coffee in his kitchen, wearing clothes that could belong to either of them. That alone makes Dan think it may have all been worth it; that, and the toothpaste-tinged kiss Casey offers up as Dan leads him to the kitchen.

“Did you leave any reading material for the rest of New York?” Casey asks, eying the armful of newsprint as he pours.

“Well,” Dan drops the Sunday _Times_ on the kitchen counter. It hits like the quarter-pound of newsprint that it is. “We’ve got your crossword.” He adds the _Post_ , “your political analysis—spoiler alert, Bartlett’s doing well in the straw polls, I always liked that guy.” _Sports Illustrated_ slithers off the stack, followed by the _New Yorker_ , “your mocking material and some culture.” He retrieves the _New Yorker_ and flips to the reviews. “And I was thinking…we should go see a play. We’re practically right next door to the world’s greatest theater district, and we never go.”

“I dunno, Danny,” Casey hands him a mug and scans the Post headlines. His smile is just a split-second too late to be real; it doesn’t have enough time to reach his eyes. Dan’s seen him turn it on for too many cameras to be fooled. “Have you spoken to the West End? I think they have some opinions about world’s greatest theater district.”

It is actually, physically painful—Dan feels a rawness in his throat, a tightness in his chest—to see Casey making such an _effort_ to be cheerful. But then, it hadn’t been so long ago that they had been the topic of an editorial in the _Times_ , an op-ed in the _Post_ , a full goddamn cover story in _Sports Illustrated_. Dan’s name had been right up there, as always, alongside Casey McCall, but Case had gotten the worst of it.

After all, Casey McCall had once been the 92nd most important person in sports. The left accused him of cowardice, of living in the closet for the sake of his career. “Casey McCall could have been a beacon of hope and inspiration to the youth of America, were it not for his selfish need to preserve his own image,” wrote the guy in the _Post_. The right accused him of corrupting the great tradition of American sports. An evangelical preacher from Atlanta with more charisma than sense trotted out the “bisexuality is a myth” argument (again) and used Casey as his poster boy. Lisa made some unfortunate remarks to ESPN-2, which were then quoted in an even more unfortunate context in a meme that made the rounds of the internet. There was a skit on Saturday Night Live. One of the Giants said he felt betrayed and uncomfortable: “I just mean, like, the locker room is my workplace. It’s my place of work. And if they’re gonna let people like Casey McCall in there, I should know about how he is. That’s fair. Otherwise, it’s, like, practically harassment. You know?”

(The linebacker in question never mentioned Dan Rydell and, actually, the only Sports Night staffer he’d ever met was Jeremy.

“Here,” Jeremy had quietly handed Dan a tape in the editing bay, four hours after the interview broke. “I looked it up. I don’t know if you can—I don’t know, maybe defamation or something? Something to prove that guy doesn’t know what he was talking about. Casey wasn’t even there.”

 Dan had looked at the tape, one of the small black digital kind they still used for short clips. “I honestly don’t even remember airing it.”

“Oh, we didn’t.”

“This moron is making a fuss about the sexual orientation of a guy he never met and a tape we never aired?”

Jeremy had shrugged, looking as tired as Dan felt. “Guy was a twelfth round draft pick with bad knees and worse stats. He’s trying to run out the clock on his fifteen minutes of fame.” He had slotted the tape into a shelf of equally anonymous recordings. “He didn’t have anything to say; we bumped the whole clip when the Browns went into overtime).

So, yeah, anyone could see Casey had it worse, objectively. And, then, too, the celebritization of sports, making athletes more famous for their personal lives than their professional skills, had always been Casey’s particular cross to bear. Dan was occasionally annoyed, but more often simply amused, by a culture that wanted to know who Tiger Woods slept with or what fabric Serena Williams used on her couch. It wasn’t news, but it made a good story…and it made Casey nuts, which had always been fun. Until it wasn’t. Until Casey’s personal life—Casey’s personal life with Dan— _was_ the story. A story that eventually led Quo Vadimus to decide that Casey McCall, alongside Dan Rydell, were overshadowing the news they were supposed to present. The severance packages were generous and non-negotiable. It was as though Casey had spent his whole life warning people about a volcano, only to have it erupt and bury his own house, just like he knew it always would. Now not only was his house a smoldering wreck, but he lived with the feeling that if he’d just worked harder, been more persuasive, he could have saved it all.

Their quiet mid-season replacement had been months ago, and since then, Casey had slept a lot. He’d taken some calls from his agent, he’d turned down an interview with Oprah. He’d gone out for beers with Natalie, Jeremy, Dana, listened to their new projects. He’d spent almost as much of the winter at Dan’s apartment as he had at his own, reading every book on the shelves, even the poetry, watching old movies on the couch with his feet in Dan’s lap. There had been days—whole weeks—where it seemed like he might be surfacing. But in retrospect, Dan realizes that Casey had simply been doing what you do in live TV: grin and bear it, take one for the team, make everything look normal until the cameras stop rolling.

The last time Dan had lived with Casey grimly going through the motions like this had been right after the divorce. He was counting on what had worked then to work now. So he reached into the paper bag, past the bagels, and fished out his last newsstand purchase: Rand McNally Map #0274.

“New York to Boston?” Casey looks up from where he is reading two sports sections at once.

“Road trip. I think we should go visit Charlie. You know, show up unannounced, embarrass the hell out of him in front of those campers he’s counselor-ing, all that good stuff.”

“You’re a lunatic,” Casey rolls his eyes, but this time his smile is genuine. Just thinking about Charlie can always cheer him up. “And Charlie’s working.”

“Charlie is a junior camp counselor. He’s practically an intern, probably bringing coffee and making photocopies for the _real_ camp counselors. Besides, we could embarrass the hell out of him and then go do our own thing, if need be.”

There is a long pause. Casey’s eyes are fixed on the newspaper in front of him. “The Red Sox have an exhibition game Wednesday.”

Dan smiles. “It’s a date.”

 

**MAP 2:**

Casey picks up the notebook at a gas station mini-mart on the Massachusetts turnpike. He goes in for Gatorade, L’il Debby, and enough regular unleaded to get them back to New York, which is absolutely the last place on the populated planet that Casey wants to go.

He’s never _loved_ New York, not like Danny. He came to the Big Apple because that’s where you went if you wanted to be more than cable access, and he stayed because Charlie was there, Dan was there, the show was there. Now...well, one out of three are the kind of odds that get you bumped from the team.

He shouldn’t complain; Casey knows he’s been lucky. Some people—he’s met them, he’s _interviewed_ them—work all their lives toward goals that never happen: an incrementally faster 100 meter dash, a scoreless game, an Olympic gold, an Olympic _place._ But things had come quickly and gracefully to Casey McCall. If it hadn’t exactly been easy, it had been fair: he’s had to work for things, but he’s usually gotten them in the end.

Casey wanders past the snacks and into the odd little section of stationary supplies, just for the distraction. He tries to imagine a situation in which a person might be road-tripping through New England and find himself in sudden, desperate need of a miniature stapler. He stops to spin the metal rack of maps. Beyond them, through the glass of the convenience store, he can see Dan chatting to one of the gas station attendants. Even after years of seeing him do interviews, Casey is newly amazed at how Danny can just start a conversation with anyone. Has he always been that way, and Casey is just starting to appreciate it now?  Just two nights ago, it had been the guy selling beer in the cheap seats at Fenway. “’Bet you’ve seen some games,” Dan had said while digging in his pockets for exact change. That had led to a fifteen-minute disquisition on the history and highlights of Red Sox baseball. It would have made great color commentary…for the sports show they didn’t have anymore.

Baseball had always been Danny’s favorite mainstream sport, maybe tied with basketball. Casey had been more of a football guy, at least until Charlie joined Little League. In high school, his son had switched to track, mostly distance events. Eventually, Charlie and Danny bonded over sailing, which he’d picked up at the same summer camp he’s working at now. But Casey had noticed the old tattered copy of _Shoeless Joe_ when Charlie toured them around the cabin he shared with the other junior counselors. Baseball is one of those sports you can follow like a fan, or just dip into now and then as a casual observer: you can meet it on your own terms, it’ll always be there.

Casey gives the rack of maps one more twirl before selecting the one he wants, the map that will lead them to Cooperstown. Then, on the way out, he adds one more thing: a school notebook, one of those black and white composition books with the ruled pages, on sale because schools closed two weeks ago. It’s mid-June, which automatically means end-of-school to anyone who hadn’t been anchoring a sports show for over a decade.   For Casey, mid-June will always be baseball season.

 

**MAP 5**

Dan and Casey find home base in a back alley, exactly where the groundskeeper said it would be. They’d gone to the stadium, first, to see the Reds play the Cubs and to buy a ridiculously overpriced postcard. They would mail it to Charlie; he’d insisted they send him one from every park they visited.

“This whole trip was your idea,” Casey had protested, mock-offended, “now you want postcards, too?!”

“My idea? Oh, yeah, I really had to twist your arm.” Charlie had shot back. “Anyway, it’s my car, too.”

Dan, listening in on speakerphone from the driver's seat, had ruled: “Fair point.” It’s true. They are traveling in the old red Jeep Casey had bought when Charlie got his learner’s permit. (Lisa had thought the boy should have a car. Casey had thought the boy should have a car when he could buy one himself. His ongoing pro/con list had reached the length of an epic poem and caused Isaac Jaffee to finally break his don’t-advise-on-other-people’s-children rule. Casey bought the Jeep. Charlie would pay him back, in installments. And though Charlie doesn’t know it yet, when he graduates high school, Casey will write him a check for the full amount).

Because only a lunatic would drive in the quaint Cape town where Charlie is working, the Jeep had been garaged near Casey’s apartment for the summer. Now the backseat is full of styrofoam coffee cups; Wal-Mart three pack t-shirts; books from secondhand stores in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit.

The Jeep is old enough that is only has a CD player and a crappy radio, so whenever they get miles of poor reception, shotgun read aloud to the driver.   Casey had been three-quarters through _Shoeless Joe_ when he got to the line, ' _A baseball park at night is more like a church than a church_.'

“When did they start playing night games, anyway?” Dan had asked. “It was in Cleveland, right?”

“Philadelphia, I thought.”

They’d ended up calling Jeremy at home, the little Bronxville apartment he and Natalie moved into when they got married. In the background, Dan could hear the SportsCenter theme. (“Look, that’s Mommy’s smash-cut,” Jeremy narrates to baby Isaac).

Jeremy had told them, instantly, that the first big-league baseball game to be played at night, under lights, was in May 1935. “The Reds beat the Phillies, if I recall correctly.”

“If you say it, I believe it,” Casey assures him.

“It was really a publicity gimmick to get people to buy baseball tickets. The Major Leagues had resisted night games as new-fangled nonsense, but there was a Depression on. You’ll never guess who flipped the switch.”

“The President,” Dan says, the same instant Casey says, “FDR”

“Oh. You guessed.”

“Well, it’s kind of like throwing out the first pitch, right?”

“Uhm, not to be indelicate, but, knowing what we know about FDR—”

“They did it by telegraph: he just pushed a button in Washington and the lights went on at Crosley Field.”

“Ok, now, that is a fact I did not know.”

“Yeah, your geek cred is safe with us, Jeremy.”

“You can’t imagine my relief.”

~~~

Halfway through the seventh inning stretch, Dan had turned to Casey and said, “Crosley Field.”

“Yeah. I was wondering about that,” Casey replied, holding up the postcard they’d bought for Charlie. Is captioned: _Great American Ball Park, Home of the Cincinnati Reds_.

“Maybe Jeremy got that detail wrong,” Dan says, hopefully.

~~~

Jeremy had not gotten that detail wrong. Crosley Field, where the Reds had played for 86 seasons, had been torn down in 1972.

They get the details from the guy picking up scattered beer cups and torn programs at the end of the night: “Yeah, I’ve heard of it, but I never saw any games there—first game I remember was in the old Riverfront Stadium, where the Reds moved after. Curtis might know about your park, though.”

Curtis is one of the groundskeepers and, he is pleased to tell them, the third longest-working employee on the Reds payroll. “There’s some lady in accounting, been here 39 years. But she’s got to retire someday. Not me, though. What would I do? Ain’t nothing so beautiful as a baseball field.”

“It’s more like a church than a church,” Dan replies.

“Truer words, son,” and Curtis pauses for a moment to send a prayerful gaze up towards the batter’s eye. “Now Rick said you wanted to know about Crosley, but you’re about thirty-odd years too late. They tried to play football in it, and then they tried to make it a community sports thing. But, the thing is, folks had played ball on that patch of ground for a hundred years. It was just too damn small for modern baseball, but the city kind of grew up around it. So you couldn’t build out without moving streets and buying up people’s front lawns and what-all.”

“So there’s nothing left? From say, 1935?” Casey asked.

“Well,” Curtis looks doubtful. “I could show you where it was…”

~~~

He had drawn the outline on a tourist map of Cincy, shading in the edges of the streets, and then shook their hands and wished them luck.

(“I was sorry to hear when you went off the air,” he adds, shyly, as they’re leaving. It’s the first time he’s mentioned recognizing them. “Those other people they have on now—they just like to argue about stats and such. If you can’t have fun with baseball, why bother?”)

And that is how Casey and Dan find themselves standing in a back alley, holding a hand-drawn map and a bunch of photos printed in the hotel’s business suite. Someone has been here before them, some baseball fan: there’s a five-sided shape stenciled onto the concrete—home plate. They stand on either side and Dan holds up one of their print-outs: a distance shot taken in 1937, the scoreboard and those famous lights, a batter’s-eye view.

 

**MAP 18:**

After Curtis, they get recognized a few times, stopped for autographs, but less and less frequently the farther west they go. As Sam Donovan had liked to remind them, Sports Night had never been big in the middle-America demographic. There are a few small towns where the motel clerks raise an eyebrow when they book a room with just one bed, but for the most part, no one pays them any attention.

One day, when they pull off the highway for gas, they see a couple of kids tumble out of a mini-van carrying bats and mitts. Danny doesn’t even have to say anything: Casey is already pulling into the lot by the municipal park.

The Little League game is in its third inning when the coach—looks like a college kid,  and his shirt says _Don Waverly Lincoln Dealership Lions-COACH_ —scowls at them through the backstop. When a ground ball to second sends the home team back to the field, he calls over a couple of the kids, whispers instructions. They start in on some pitching drills and the coach makes his way towards the stands.

“Afternoon,” Dan says cheerfully when the coach stops in front of them.

He’s wondering if he’s got anything to sign autographs with when the man asks them to stop holding hands. “There are children present.”

Danny looks down and, sure enough, his fingers are laced through Casey’s where their hands rest on the splintered bleachers.

“Hey, if that’s enough to shock the kids here in Mayberry, then I commend you on your time machine,” he says, and he means it as a joke—surely the guy is joking?—but Coach doesn’t take it that way.

“I’m going to ask you one more time, and then you’re going to have to leave,” he says, louder, in the style of a man who regularly disciplines 10-year-olds.

“Look,” Dan tries again, “we’re not bothering anyone. Just on our way through town and we’re baseball fans, is all.” He smiles his most winning smile, the one that he brought out for ratings sweeps and awards banquets. “We’re retracing the route of the Kansas City Monarchs. They were the longest-playing Negro League franchise,” Dan adds brightly.

Coach does not look impressed. “I won’t say it again. Your behavior is not appropriate at a children’s park.”

“Jackie Robinson played for the Monarchs,” Dan continues. The kids are still pitching on the field, but the other adults watching—parents, babysitters—are starting to stare. “They actually played night games with lights as early as 1930, which is a full five years before May 1935, when white, Major League ga—”

“All right, that’s it!” the coach actually rolls up his sleeves, like he is personally going to climb the rickety bleachers and throw them out. It makes Dan laugh which, in retrospect, he realizes might not be the wisest move.

“Your batter opens up too early,” Casey says. Both Dan and the coach stare at him. “What?” Casey blinks, “look at him.”

And, maybe because the comment is so unexpected, the coach does.

Dan, too, looks at the kid warming up in the batter’s box. He _does_ swing early; if he waited just a bit longer, he’d almost double his power. But Casey critiquing Little League technique like some sort of baseball RainMan is not the response to homophobia Dan had expected…

“My son played Little League,” Casey explains earnestly to the coach. “And I cannot tell you how many spring training events I’ve been to. We met at one, actually, Danny and I—years ago. Not exactly love at first sight; the registration people screwed up our name tags.” The coach is flummoxed, not sure what to do with all these words, but he looks like he’s about to object when he hears _love._

Before he can, Casey stands up, and Dan has to follow because they are, after all, holding hands. Now _everyone_ is looking at them, even the players. Nevertheless, Casey makes his way down two levels to the field, chatting like the coach has asked for his input. “Anyway, those other kids, the ones sponsored by the dry cleaning place? Their infield is quicker than yours, ‘cause they send all their clumsy kids to the outfield. So _that’s_ where you want to put the ball, and you can only do that if your batter opens up sooner.  You are gonna lead with that blond kid, right?—Hey, kid!” Casey calls, suddenly, and the boy at bat is so startled to be called out of the audience that he actually points to himself: _who, me_?

“Don’t talk to him!” the coach says, trailing behind. But the kid, already trained by Southern, small-town manners to respond politely to adults, has taken the three steps he needs to move into Casey’s orbit.

Casey drops Dan’s hand. “Batter up,” he says, and when the kid assumes his batting stance, he nudges his shoulders into a better position. “Now,” he says, bringing the bat forward so the kid can feel the rotation, “when you swing, swing all the way through.”

“If you touch him again, I’m calling the police,” the coach shouts, shrilly. Casey doesn’t even turn to look at him.

“That means you have to start the swing sooner,” he says like the coach hasn’t spoken. “Make sense?”

The kid—a Norman Rockwell original, corn-colored hair, with a gap where a tooth is growing in—nods, his confused eyes darting between Casey and his coach.

“Okay,” Casey says, and then he grabs up Dan’s hand, and they walk back to the lot where they’ve parked the Jeep.

“He can’t make us leave, you know. It’s a public park,” Dan says, finally.

“Eh, if we stopped a ballgame every time some coach was a jerk, there would be no professional sports. Anyway, already know how it’s gonna end,” Casey says. “The dry cleaning place _really_ has a much better infield.”

He puts the car into drive and Dan wonders where this calm, can’t-please-everybody-every-time acceptance is coming from, where it was all winter.   Maybe Casey has learned what Dan spent thousands of dollars being told in therapy: that when you have the true, unwavering love of a couple of people—people who love you for who you are, not what you do, not what you can do for them—when you have that kind of love, you don’t need three million viewers who love only what they see on TV.

**MAP 39:**

It’s late September, autumn being practically the only time Baltimore is fit for human habitation, and the sky above Camden Yards is velvety dark. The spill of the stadium lights wash out any stars.   Dan thinks about the long-gone lights at Crosley Field, bright in the Depression, and the make-shift lamps the Negro League teams used to mount on their team buses so they could play for factory workers coming off shift.

He and Casey stand for the National Anthem, shouting the _O_ of _O say can you see_ along with all the other Orioles fans. After a debate that took up most of the drive across the Great Plains, they had resolved to simply support the home team of wherever they were.

After this, they will go back to New York. Casey wants to track down the details of a sprinkler head in right field where a young Mickey Mantle had tripped while chasing down a fly ball in the second game of the 1951 World Series. In yielding the play—a deep, right-center ball fired off by Willie Mays—to the centerfielder, one Joe DiMaggio, The Mick had twisted his knee. He'd played in constant, grinding, self-medicated pain for the next 17 years. People still argue whether is was DiMaggio's ball or not. Casey wants to see that hidden danger, wants to track down the details for the Book.

Somewhere between interviewing a farm team in Mississippi and reaching the Pacific Ocean, Dan had started calling the discounted copybook The Book, and now Casey does, too. It is full of notes, quotations from interviews, tickets and receipts taped in next to programs and game schedules, an atlas of hand-drawn maps based on hear-say (“see, you go down past the old furniture warehouse, and turn left, then right, can’t miss it, s’where they always play when the weather’s good…”). They’d treated it like one of their scripts, passing it back and forth, changing each other’s word choice, adding details, crosshatching sections that ran too long. It’s missing pages where people asked them for autographs. It has ketchup stains, a whole page smeared with sunscreen, a section warped when a water bottle exploded. Casey had painstakingly dried it out, page by page, with a motel hairdryer because, unlike their scripts, there’s not a rundown copy and a draft copy and a copy saved to the TelePromTer. The Book is the only copy.

Books take longer than TV shows. Later, Casey will calculate that they could have made 147 episodes of television in the time it takes them to turn their notebook into a real, published book. But tonight, there is popcorn and beer and a 2-5 game with three more innings to go, and after that...

“We should go to San Pedro de Macoris,” Dan announces.

“San Pedro?” Casey asks around a mouthful of hot dog. “That sounds very, uh, Catholic. Are you feeling the need to convert, Danny, cause I gotta tell you, it would take divine intervention to save the Orioles fielders tonight.”

“Also known as Macoris del Mar, or _Macoris of the Sea,"_ Danny continues, unfazed.  The O's would never let him down. “To differentiate it from its northern neighbor, San _Francisco_ de Macoris.”

After nearly five months on the road, Casey is accustomed to Dan's verbal footnotes. “And what’s in this seaside paradise?”

“Baseball players,” Danny says. “They call it _the cradle of shortstops_. Apparently the climate is perfect for two things: growing sugarcane and training shortstops. I counted more than 70 MLB players born there.”

“Where is it?”

“Dominican Republic.”

Casey raises his eyebrows, considering. “Never been.”

“Well, now’s our chance.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The epigraph is from Sports Night, Season 1, Episode 2 (The Apology). I played around a little with the timeline of celli's original, just to make the ages line up. And I made up virtually all of the non-historical baseball references.


End file.
